


meet you there

by steelandtemper



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: 'i hate you', 'i know', (somewhat), Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Dark Rey (Star Wars), F/M, Force Ghost Ben Solo, Heavy Angst, Liberal Interpretation of The Force, NO SOLID/STRAIGHTFORWARD HEA, Post-Canon, Redeemed Ben Solo, Role Reversal, a flipping of the script if you will, angst with a sad-but-hopeful aftertaste, basically it's sad, do not expect a full/traditional HEA, liberal interpretation of Dark/Light
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-03
Updated: 2021-03-03
Packaged: 2021-03-16 00:27:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,466
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29816670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/steelandtemper/pseuds/steelandtemper
Summary: Two Years Post-TROSShe’s alone one night, sheltering in a cave on Dathomir, when it comes— the voice.The one that dares pretend to be him. It’s stronger than ever, and says it wants to help. It begs her to turn back. To go home to her friends.Rey’s saber ignites, bathing the cave in red. She swings to kill.
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Kudos: 13





	meet you there

She sees him first this time, before he speaks.

“Go away.”

‘See’ is a strong word. He’s a wisp. Not even a ghost. The edges of where a figure _would_ be blur the background in thin outlines, barely visible in the dim fire light. She’s been through this before— seeing it from the corner of her eye, turning, squinting, then… nothing. 

But the voice is definitely not nothing.

“Or else…?” it answers, close and calm, like it was inside her own head.

“Go _away!”_ she snarls louder, drawing and igniting the saber at her hip in one swift movement. It illuminates the small cave with a dense red glow.

“Come on. You know you can’t kill me.”

She pivots with the blade, using the light to scour her surroundings, already knowing she’ll find no sign of him or anything else. 

“Everything can be killed,” she counters.

“And things that are already dead?”

Rey thinks she sees a blur to her right. She swings randomly, gashing a burnt line into the stone wall of the cave.

“Rey,” it says, trying to reason.

“No,” Rey cuts, holding the saber with both hands, ready to strike again. At anything. “Get out of my head.”

It laughs. It has the gall to laugh. “This again.”

“Shut _up._ ”

“Are you… what are you doing in a cave?”

“I don’t want to talk to you. I won’t.”

“We didn’t have a choice before, did we?”

_How dare—_ Rey lets out a scream, launching forward and blindly slashing at the walls around her like a wild animal. For a while, the only sound is the violent impact of saber on stone, over and over. Sparks fly. The flares of light blind her, put white behind her eyelids.

It’s quiet for a moment after she finally stops, panting.

Then the voice just picks up again. “Wow, you’ve turned into—”

_“You’re not him!”_ she yells, cutting him off before he can say ‘ _me.’_ Before she has to hear it in his voice.

“How do you know that?”

She closes her eyes. There’s no one to look at, anyway. “You’re just not.” 

It’s a trick. The force, toying with her. Or some unseen enemy. Or, worst of all, her. Wishing, imagining, going insane all by herself. She’s been traveling alone for so long. It would make sense she created him; she hasn’t spoken to anyone aloud in close to two months. The search for her most recent holocron hasn’t required much socialization.

The voice started a couple weeks ago and she’s already sick of it. It usually goes away at this point— after a good minute or two of yelling at it. But not this time. 

It’s never stuck around this long before.

“You don’t _want_ me to be,” the voice replies thoughtfully, like he’s putting it together.

Rey says nothing. It’s not real. She won’t entertain it.

If she can’t chase it away, then she’ll just suck it up and wait it out. She’s the poster child of waiting. It’ll be fine.

She disengages her saber and sits down, back against the cold wall. Only the light from her small fire remains. The cave smells faintly of smoke now— a sharper smell that the one of burning wood alone. Charred rock. 

“Because then it would be easier, wouldn’t it?” it continues. “To keep going like this. To have nothing between you and your endless revenge, or whatever it is you’re doing.”

Rey keeps her mouth shut tight, pointedly adjusting her arm wraps for distraction.

“Because then some kind of catharsis would still feel possible.”

She tosses another piece of wood into the fire. Throws it, more like. She has to bite her lip to keep from responding.

“Because if you believed I was still out there somewhere, you’d be forced to have some kind of hope again, wouldn’t you? And you’d have to shake yourself out of… _this._ ”

“ _‘This?’_ ” Rey snaps, unable to hold back anymore. “This is it. This is the reality. This is who I am.”

“No, it’s who you’ve made yourself. The same way I made myself.”

“Stop it. You’re not him.” Her voice breaks. “You’re not real.”

The fire crackles. Rey blinks at it, lost.

“But… if I was? Then what would you say?”

Rey pulls her knees to her chest, wrapping them close. It’s quiet for a while. He waits.

“I’d tell you I hate you.”

“Why?” 

“You left me,” she says simply, still staring into the fire. Her eyes burn. “You saved me, but you left me alone. I know it had to be one of us, but you chose me.”

“You’re not alone,” he says softly.

“No,” Rey says, sounding empty. “You don’t get to say that. Never again.”

“What about your friends?”

She shakes her head with a weak, mirthless laugh. Her ‘friends’ have direct orders to apprehend or kill her on sight. She’s wanted dead or alive— not that a single soul in the galaxy could manage either. Rey has made herself one of the single most powerful creatures alive.

“And I’m still with you.”

Rey’s hands ball into painful fists. “No you’re not.”

“We’ve broken the rules of time and space before. What makes you think it would be impossible for us to do it again? For me to find a way to you?”

“Stop,” she begs, hiding her face in her knees. Tears are beginning to form despite how angry she is, despite hard she’s fighting them. “Whatever this is, whoever you are— stop.”

“No, I won’t give up on you. You didn’t for me.”

This is _cruel_. Possibly the cruelest thing that could be inflicted on her.

“Please,” she tries again, weaker. Pathetic. “Please stop.” 

“Let me in.”

Rey shakes her head, stifling the sob rising in her throat.

If she lets him in, she lets everything in. It would kill her. 

She only survived the past two years by blocking everything from the past out, including him.

When he left, she elected to harden herself instead of falling apart. She chose to move only forward, to kill the past, to grow stronger. She burned down every belief she used to have and started over.

In the wake of that, she was left with three things: his absence, rage towards a corrupt galaxy, and a darkness that fit much more comfortably than whatever she’d been wearing before.

That was the ground from which she built herself up from. That is _her._

“Rey."

“I can’t.” 

“You can. I’m right here.”

“You’re not real,” she says again in a whisper, but she’s never been more unsure. 

“I know it’s harder this way. I know it is, but just try. Let me in.” He pauses. Then, quietly, like reciting a memory, “Please.”

A tidal wave comes over Rey.

It comes for her core. It rips open the wall in her chest that guards the part of herself she doesn’t let out anymore. The soft part, the last little hopeful part. It gets swept into the open, raw and undefended for the first time in years.

She barely feels the tears falling down her own face. _If it’s really… if he’s really…_

The quiet word struggles in her mouth. She sounds so, so small. 

“B…Ben?”

The willful vulnerability leaves a door hanging open, and something comes through. She feels it happen in the force around her.

Sudden warmth presses against her shoulder. She can’t look. She’s too fragile.

“Open your eyes,” he says softly. The sound comes from beside her now, no longer inside her head.

Gentle fingers touch her chin, tilting it.

Her eyes open.

Ben. 

Face and hair clean and unmarred, wearing a plain black shirt. Sitting right beside her.

In this moment, looking at him, Rey doesn’t care whether or not it’s real. With a strange sob, she throws her arms around him. He’s warm. Solid. His arms come around her middle in turn.

They never got this when he was alive. They never got anything while he was alive. She never got to—

“It’s okay,” he murmurs, lifting a hand to the back of her head, fingers slipping into her loose hair. Rey lets all the _nevers_ in her head dissipate. 

She can’t talk for a long time. Part of it is being too overwhelmed. Part of it is worrying if she speaks, he might disappear. Or she might wake up.

He’s the one to pull away first, inspecting her face.

“What are you doing?”

“What are _you_ doing?” she answers. “Is this real?”

_Stars._ She’d been beginning to forget the details of his face. The exact smattering of beauty marks. The marbling of green in his brown eyes. Everything.

“I think so.” He looks around the cave. “Where are you?”

“Dathomir.” 

Ben frowns. “Why are you on Dathomir?”

“Does it matter?”

“Rey…” He looks her up and down. “You have to go back home. You’re not well.”

“That’s rich, coming from you.”

“I’m fine. And I did go home. To you.”

That just hurts. Because he did come back to her in the end, and he died for it. 

“Well, I’m not her. I’m not who you remember.” The girl he knew died on Exegol. 

“Yes you are.”

“You don’t know that. You don’t know what I’ve _done,”_ she retorts, throat tightening. “It’s been years, Ben.”

“Has it?” he asks curiously, looking around again as though it could help him figure it out. “How many?”

“Two. And a half.”

A pause. Then, “Well, that’s nothing, isn’t it?”

She goes to hit him on the shoulder, genuinely angry at his flippancy, but he catches her hand as it’s coming down.

“It doesn’t matter how how long it’s been. You know that.”

_It’s not too late,_ she once said— and he’d been lost for much longer. 

But that was then, and this is now. This is different. Rey is stronger than she’s ever been. Why would she look back?

“There’s nothing left for me there,” she tells him, sure she believes it. "I have no reason to go back."

Ben sighs.

“You once had more faith than anyone in my life. In me, in everyone. Where did that go? Where did you put it?” he says, folding her hand into his own. “Because I know you couldn’t kill it. It’s too much a part of you.”

“You don’t know that,” she says quietly. “We barely even knew each other.”

His head tilts. “Then why are you crying?”

She stares at him, and he stares back. He’s painfully beautiful. She hates him.

“No. We never did know each other,” he goes back and agrees when Rey doesn’t answer. “We never got to talk like this.” His thumb passes across the back of hand. “Or touch like this. Or say what we needed to say. Did we?”

Rey shakes her head in agreement, not letting her eyes leave him. 

“So what do you need to say, Rey? What is it you need to say to me?”

It feels like she’s balancing from some high place, but she doesn’t look down. Only at him, anchored in place. He’s the only thing. She wants to tell him. Her voice cracks slightly, the confession breaking its way through the lock she’s kept it under. 

“I… miss you. So much.”

His smile is sad. “Even though you didn’t know me?”

Rey doesn’t bother answering. She knew him in the deepest ways, the ways that mattered— in ways she’s never known anyone else— and he knew her the same. He already knows that. 

But she wanted so much more. She wanted all the other ways, too— the mundane ways, the slow ways, every last intimate way there is to know a person. She wanted to know and be known by him, and to use all the years they pleased to do it. 

Because most of all, Rey wanted time. She wanted all the subtle, lasting things that ought to have come with it. 

“I miss you, too,” Ben admits quietly. “More than anything.”

Rey can’t speak from fear of falling apart. He seems to understand this, wrapping his arms around her again. 

She hasn’t been held like this in so long, and only once by him. It was that very last day, when she woke up after he saved her. His was the first face she saw when she opened her eyes from that endless black. His warmth was the first thing she felt. Then, immediately after, hope. A hope unlike any she’d felt before.

Rey starts to cry.

“It’s okay,” he tells her.

“It’s— it’s not,” she manages between increasingly shallow breaths, hiding her face in his neck. “I hate you. I _hate_ you.”

“I know,” he murmurs, but it sounds like more.

Rey cries harder. It feels like two and a half years worth of tears, and she lets it happen. So does Ben. He says nothing, only soothes her with a slow hand back and forth across her back.

Finally she pulls back, pulling together some modicum of dignity.

“Where did you go?” Rey asks with resolve, wiping her face with the back of her hand. “Where are you now?”

“I don’t know, really. I just felt you and I followed.”

“But before that?” she demands.

“I…” He frowns. “Don’t remember anything before that.”

“So you’re not with the Force?”

He frowns deeper, thinking. “I mean… I guess not.”

Rey’s minds starts working through this information. The possibilities. 

“It doesn’t matter,” he interrupts, sensing her train of thought. “That’s not why I’m here— you can’t keep going like this. You need to go home, you need your friends.”

“They don’t want me.”

“Of course they want you.”

Rey looks away, back to the little fire. “You don’t understand. It’s not your fault, but you don’t. The blood on my hands…. I’ve gone too far.”

“Further than I went?”

_Close,_ she thinks, but says nothing.

After a moment, Ben reaches and brushes back a piece of her hair. It tickles her cheek as it goes, and that tiny detail— that faint kiss of nothing but perfect care— floods Rey with such pain it takes her breath away. She almost leaves her body from it.

“There’s a way back for you,” he says, pulling her back. “There is. And I know you want to take it, deep down.”

There’s no point in arguing him. He’s the only person who could say these things. He’s the only one who could ever really know. 

Still doesn’t mean she has to agree.

Rey gives up any last shred of propriety and slumps against him, laying her head on his shoulder. “You think it would’ve been like this, you and me? If you hadn’t gone?”

“…Does it matter now?” he asks softly, as though trying to protect her. As though trying to guide her away from more hurt. “Is there any point left in wondering?” 

“Yes,” she answers, quiet but sure. She knows what he means, but the answer is still yes. She doesn’t want protection from the truth. “I need to know.”

He thinks. “Then yes. I would’ve followed you any place you went, as long as you wanted me there.”

Rey closes her eyes, absorbing the blow.

“I did,” she whispers. “I wanted you there.”

“Then… I would’ve made sure you were happy,” he finishes simply. “For the rest of your life.”

She smiles weakly, turning her face into his arm. “To make up for before?”

“To make sure you had what you deserved.” Ben gently guides her face up from its hiding place to look at her. “Rey.” His eyes feel sad and ancient. “Go home.”

She starts to shake her head.

“No— you’ll never be happy like this,” he presses. “You’ll never reach a level or a point that will be enough. This coldness will only go on forever if you don’t stop. It’s bottomless.”

He’s speaking from experience, she knows, and her gut genuinely twists at the truth she feels in the words. 

It’s a truth she already knows, deep down. Nowadays she only ever feels rare little glimpses of that truth, but even then never long enough to acknowledge it honestly. It’s just so easy to ignore such ugly knowledge when she can instead choose to stay high on her own power. When she can choose endless conquering over endless suffering. 

But Ben is saying they are one in the same.

“There’s a better place for you. There are people out there who love you. There’s hope.” Then, quieter, “I know you miss your friends.”

In her weakened state, Rey allows herself to do something she hasn’t allowed in years: she thinks of them.

Of Finn, his smile, his hugs, his infectious excitability. 

And of Rose, with her wit and determination, her kindness.

Even Poe, the cocky ass who got on her nerves but made her laugh like no one else.

Rey nods. 

_Yes._ Yes, she misses them. She misses herself, misses the warmth of the past, all of it. Her chest _hurts_ with the missing. All the anger and hate in the galaxy couldn’t truly burn it away— not in two years, not in two hundred. 

“You’ve already had to be braver in your short life than anyone I’ve ever known. And I’m so sorry for that. I wish you’d never had to be.” He takes her face in his hands, meaning each word. “But now I need you to be brave again. One more time. _Go back_.”

Rey swallows, mind spinning. “But everything I’ve worked for, everything I’ve _done_ —”

“It doesn’t matter— you do. You matter more than any of it.”

Rey drops her gaze, overwhelmed. He lets go of her.

“You deserve more than this darkness. You deserve peace, you deserve to be loved.” He pauses. “It still calls to you, I know it does. Let it back in.”

_The light._

Rey shivers. “No. I’m not doing that.”

“You have to,” he urges. “Let it in. You already let me in. Come on. I’m right here with you.”

“But you’re not,” she accuses sharply, looking up at him again. “Not really.”

He winces slightly. “No, but… but I’m always with you.”

“That’s not good enough,” she snaps, holding back a fresh wave of tears— the strongest yet. “It’s not _enough,_ Ben.”

The heartbreak on his face— the flash of helplessness in his eyes— only proves she’s right. It shatters her. Like a knife it cuts deep, pushes in, and twists. 

From the wound the truth flows out, thick and warm, faster than she can hold it in.

“I can’t. I can’t do it without you,” it spills from her. “I need you. I’ve needed you for two and a half years, I needed you before that, and I’ll keep needing you until I die, but you’re not _here_ , and you’ll never—”

Ben grabs her face and kisses her.

Rey’s astonishment lasts less than a heartbeat before she’s melting, giving in, holding on for strength.

There’s no rusty taste of blood this time, no broken bones or shaky muscles. Just Ben. Just his lips on hers, full and gentle. There’s a note of desperation pulled tight beneath the sweetness, vibrating harder between them with each passing second. 

Soon, without thinking, Rey is sliding her arms around Ben’s neck and Ben is snaking a slow arm around her waist. He pulls her closer, inch by inch, until she’s practically flush against him. Seamless.

Perfectly meshed and perfectly matched. They tangle and fit together like pieces of a puzzle, every little push and pull finding home. His mouth is soft like before, but now warmer, sweeter, more open. The laces have loosened from what they shared those years ago, the hesitancy of first-time discovery let go.

It makes Rey’s stomach flutter but twist. It makes her heart pound but break.

Because, most of all, underneath everything, Ben is being careful with her. He’s comforting her. 

He’s already saying goodbye.

He reigns in it, pulling away and resting his forehead against hers. They both breathe for a moment, Rey shaken to her core by the thousand lifetimes it feels like she just glimpsed within one kiss.

“You don’t need me. You never did. It was never like that,” Ben says quietly. “If anything, I needed you— to turn back. And I did.”

“And now you’re dead,” she reminds him hollowly.

“Do I look dead to you?”

Rey pulls back to stare at him. “What are you saying?”

“I don’t know, only what I said before. You and I seem to exist in a… gray area. Of the universe.”

_'We’ve broken the rules of time and space before,’_ is what he’d actually said, she remembers. ‘ _What makes you think it would be impossible for us to do it again?’_

“Do you… do you really think there’s a way? To…?” 

She can’t bring herself to say it. Not yet. Hope is too dangerous. She spent two and a half years suffocating it; she’s not about to let it breathe again just so it can turn around and kill _her._

“I don’t know,” Ben says honestly. “I don’t know where I am. I don’t know anything other than I’m here right now, and that alone shouldn’t be possible.”

Rey hesitantly reaches up to his face, testing its realness. She touches his hair briefly, then his brow, then down his nose, and lastly his lips. Her fingers linger there.

“Then that’s what I need to be doing,” she says, feeling the realization turn her entire world upside down. She needs to be looking for him. She needs to bring him back to her.

Her takes her hand from his mouth. “No, Rey. That’s not… you need to go home.”

“You’re my home,” she whispers. He said the same for her, just minutes ago. It’s the truth. Saying it aloud, allowing herself to recognize it, rips a tiny tear into the carefully tight-woven fabric of her being.

He smiles a little. “So are they. And they’re here, now. They can help you where I can’t.”

_Finn’s laugh. Rose’s voice. Poe’s dumb grin._

And the tear rips wider.

“But they won’t. They won’t forgive me for what I’ve done,” she says, fighting it. “They couldn’t.”

“Maybe not soon. Maybe not completely, maybe not ever— but they want you back.”

“How could you know that?”

“Because you’re Rey, and they love you.”

The light shining through that growing tear looks like it burns. 

Her voice is very far away to her own ears. “It’ll hurt, won’t it?”

“Yes,” he says. “Terribly.”

Rey nods, at least appreciating the honesty. She lets silence settle around them.

Then, “I’ll think about it.”

He gives her a serious, all-knowing look. “No. You know what you have to do.”

“I hate you.”

Ben smiles and kisses her again, sweet and lingering. 

This would be so much easier if he was with her. If she never had to let go.

“How long can you stay?” she asks as he pulls away.

“I don’t know.”

“Try to stay? As long as you can. Please.”

He nods.

Satisfied, Rey settles herself comfortably up against him. She tilts her head up slightly, secretly studying his face while she can.

She presses one barely-there kiss to his neck. He makes a soft sound, and Rey starts pressing more slow, experimental, deliberate kisses to the skin her mouth can reach. His jaw, his cheek, the corner of his mouth. Testing. Exploring all the little places she would kiss him if she had all the time in the world— just to pretend that she did. 

She takes her time, a ridiculous amount of it, savoring the little tactile sensations of having him real, beneath her touch. The warmth of his skin. The slight scratch of the shadow of scruff on his jaw. His slow breath, barely rustling her hair.

Ben finally turns his head, having waited long enough, and captures her mouth for himself. He plays her game of pretend, kissing her with a soft, unhurried pace. Like this moment was only one in an infinite string of moments they’d already had, and knows that they will have. Like they were in the middle of forever instead of the end.

She rests her head on his chest after a while, warm inside and blissfully tired. 

She’d forgotten what this felt like— to not be alone. And maybe she is, maybe this is a dream. But it doesn’t feel like it. His arms feel warm and very much real, curled around her. The heartbeat under her ear is strong and steady. He is Ben, and she feels whole in a way she couldn’t imagine on her own, not even in dreams.

The only thing left to be said between them doesn’t need to be. 

Unlike with anyone else in her life, Rey doesn’t need to be reassured of it— he loves her, just as she loves him. They each carry pieces of the other within them; they quite literally belong with and to each other. It took them a while to get on the same page, but as soon as they did, there was no going back. After Exegol, it was irrevocable.

That discovery was deeper and truer than any feeling she’d ever had. It got cut off almost immediately, but nothing could erase the monumental _rightness_ of the few brief moments they had that day. 

To this day, Rey doesn’t doubt an inch of it. She may ignore it, try to forget it, but she could never convince herself that it wasn’t real, that it wasn’t anything less than what it truly was— a connection so deep and foundational that it could never be replaced.

Maybe that’s why she urged herself to change so much. She knew trying to replace him with any person or relationship would never work. So instead she gave herself so much power and a life so different from her previous that it would never— _could_ never— beg comparison. To him, or anything she once knew.

In truth, Ben’s death wasn’t the reason she left everything behind, nor the reason she “turned.” 

His absence was merely the black hole that began the warping of her perception of everything else in her life. She couldn’t see things the same as before. She refused all the help that was offered her in the months after their victory, and it led to a volatile depression that consumed every redeeming quality she had and destroyed every relationship she’d built. She became angrier than she’d ever been and slowly ruined all the good things she ever had— and drove away all the good people.

She reached a place so dark and hopeless that the only way to save herself from it was to throw herself into it. _If you’re falling, dive._

But after she did, she controlled it. After that, she was finally free.

_‘Free.’_ Of guilt. Of old pain. Of love.

Rey can feel herself slipping into sleep. Something in her gut tells her that Ben won’t be here when she wakes, so she forces herself to stay awake as long as possible. It’s hard with his fingers stroking her hair like this. She feels so vulnerable and safe right here, in a way she can’t ever remember feeling before— not even as a child. 

She’s doesn’t quite feel herself. Or maybe she finally feels herself.

“Ben?” she mumbles.

“Yeah?”

“I’ll find you. I swear.” Then, repeating his own words, “I won’t give up on you.”

He doesn’t answer at first, just keeps petting her hair.

“I’m not the one who needs that now.”

Rey sinks into sleep.

The red dawn on Dathomir comes, spilling thick light through the small opening of the cave she used as shelter for the night.

Rey is alone, curled up on the floor, head on her arm. No Ben.

An unfamiliar tumult of emotion twists through her insides. Guilt. Longing. More guilt.

But he’s gone now. She doesn’t have to pretend to be interested in changing anymore. She doesn’t have to pretend at all.

Rey stomps out the smoldering remains or her fire and leaves the cave to survey her surroundings.

Her small ship is still well hidden on the outcropping where she left it. No indication she’s been discovered; no sign of any other life forms in the immediate area. That could change at any moment, and given the monstrous local inhabitants, she has to be careful in the open. She pulls out her rations and eats in silence in the uncomfortably tiny hold of her ship, trying to determine her next move. 

It’s hard to focus. Strange flashes keep creeping up on her, ones she locked out ages ago. Leia’s kind face the last time she saw her. Finn and Poe hugging her after the final battle. The magic of the first time she truly felt the force with Luke. Ben’s hand reaching out to touch hers that night on Ahch-To. And just… Ben.

His wild hair.

The soft, deep set of his eyes.

His beauty marks. The shine of sweat on his skin. His rare smile.

Then, the look in his eyes in Snoke’s throne room after he killed his master. Strangely young, unsure, almost scared. And at her, almost hopeful.

The low waver in his voice when he asked her to join him.

The quiet hurt on his face on Crait before she closed the door in his face.

His relentless pursuit of her. Always saying the wrong damn thing, but never giving up and never hurting her.

Coming for her on Exegol, bruised and mussed but finally _Ben._ Then, waking up in him arms. The love and relief in his eyes. Those few moments.

Before she blocked it all out, those were the moments she’d go back to the most. He’d looked alive— _truly_ alive. Unrepressed. Happy, even. It was a change unlike any she’d ever seen.

After years of suffering, he still managed it. He turned and came back to her. And in the end, he did it himself. Rey may have been on the other side, waiting, but it was him who chose. It was him who threw himself back into the burning of the light. No one did that for him, not even her. He didn’t give up. He took that leap of faith. He chose it.

Rey stares down at her hands.

The silence around her no longer feels like her friend. It feels… unhappy with her. It seeps in.

Everything is wrong. 

She isn’t meant to be alone, and she never was. Even in her lonely childhood, that was still true. She was half a dyad in the force. She was part of something bigger than herself, something meaningful, and she always had been. 

The other half leapt to meet her once. Maybe now it’s her turn. 

That growing tear inside her rips wide open now, and Rey lets it happen. 

She chooses it. She chooses like Ben chose.

It happens like dominoes, like a tower crumbling from the inside out. 

Rey climbs into the pilot seat and powers the main console on.

Screw this pointless mission. Screw the last two years of conquering everything for absolutely nothing. Screw freedom without meaning _._ Ben was right. Her quest was bottomless. There was never any chance of a happy ending, only the tease of another empty satisfaction, stretching on forever. Like the cave on Ahch-To, leading and leading but never delivering.

There are things she’ll never be able to take back, things she’s done that she will never be able to truly atone for. She may be imprisoned when she goes back. Maybe even executed. She has no idea.

But she can’t keep going like this. She wants to be alive again. She wants to find Ben. 

And, even if it all goes wrong and neither of those things happens, if nothing else, she’ll see her friends again. Her home. That would be enough, she thinks. That would make it worth it.

Rey goes fast, afraid that if she stops now, she’ll change her mind. 

She sends a concise telecommunications to the closest known New Republic base, announcing her intention to return and surrender. That way she hopefully won’t get shot down by anyone who recognizes her or her latest stolen ship when she gets there.

There’s no way to know what will happen, or if anything will really ever be okay again.

But this darkness has dulled her long enough, and whatever the cost, she’s going home. And she’s doing it now— while his courage is still with her.

The only comfort Rey has left to hold on to as she makes her way into the upper atmosphere is the knowledge that he would be proud. 

Out beyond this endless plague of dark and light, Ben is still there. Waiting for her.

***


End file.
